{"id":15798,"date":"2016-04-13T01:00:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T05:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/southeastofheaven.com\/?p=15798"},"modified":"2016-04-05T08:58:53","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T12:58:53","slug":"content-needed-blowin-wind-with-duels-tom-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/?p=15798","title":{"rendered":"Blowin’ Wind with Duel Guitarist\/Vocalist Tom Frank: ” I get more satisfaction from playing my own songs in front of 100 people than I do playing someone else’s in front of 5,000 people.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It\u2019s time now to interview someone from that little ol\u2019 band outta Texas.\u00a0 No, not ZZ Top.\u00a0 I\u2019m talking about Texas\u2019 very own Duel.\u00a0 Duel is the creative bank for former Scorpion Child guitarist Tom Frank.\u00a0 Along with former Scorpion Child bassist, Shaun Avants, Tom has re-emerged on the scene after a nice little break with a band all his own and I couldn\u2019t be more pumped about this band.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Duel recently released their debut album on Heavy Psych Sounds and Tom was awesome enough to take the time out to talk to me.\u00a0 We talked about his split with Scorpion Child, his excitement about Duel, and how being signed to a European label has been such a huge benefit to them.\u00a0 I really enjoyed catching up with this guy again and I hope you all will enjoy getting to know Tom Frank and his band, Duel.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tom, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today dude.\u00a0 Sorry for all the delays in making this thing happen!<\/strong><\/p>\n

No worries, Don.\u00a0 It’s great to talk to you.<\/p>\n

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So the last time I talked to you was backstage here in Atlanta after an amazing Scorpion Child set.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah.\u00a0 That was Mayhem Fest.<\/p>\n

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A lot has changed since then.\u00a0 What happened between you and Scorpion Child.\u00a0 There was so much great chemistry on stage with that line up.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The reason I wasn’t playing with them anymore was pretty much financial.\u00a0 When I started playing with those guys they were in kind of a hard spot.\u00a0 They needed somebody to do the Clutch tour and I told them I could do it.\u00a0 Then another tour came up and it just turned into one after another after another.\u00a0 We were touring nine months out of a year and we were still at a point where we were pretty much doing it at a loss.\u00a0 After about a year of that, it got to where I just couldn’t keep up.\u00a0 They were getting ready to go to Europe again and they were going to try one tour as a four piece to see how it went.\u00a0 I was going to step out until we could at least make it a little more affordable but it worked out pretty good for them being a four piece.\u00a0 It saved them a lot of money not having as many guys.<\/p>\n

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Was it hard to make the decision to leave the band?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kind of.\u00a0 I loved playing with those guys.\u00a0 They’re all my buds.\u00a0 A lot of the writing for that debut record happened four years before that record was even recorded.\u00a0 It was awesome but I always felt like I was playing somebody else’s guitar parts.\u00a0 I just wanted to do something that was my own thing. \u00a0I get more satisfaction from playing my own songs in front of 100 people than I do playing someone else’s in front of 5,000 people.\u00a0 It feels more like your baby instead of watching somebody else’s kid [laughs].<\/p>\n

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Did you need to wait a while to re-evaluate things after the split with Scorpion Child or were you pretty much ready to jump head first into something new?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When they went to Europe, I had already started writing songs.\u00a0 I had shown them to a few friends that I started jamming with and they started materializing pretty quickly.\u00a0 I kind of had all this stuff that I wanted to do already and it was different from Scorpion Child.\u00a0 I wouldn’t really present it to the band since it was a little too different from the formula they had going on there.<\/p>\n

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How did former Scorpion Child bassist Shaun Avants end up in Duel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first tour I didn’t do with Scorpion Child was the European one where they had that bad split with Shaun on the road.\u00a0 After that, he just wanted to step out.\u00a0 He didn’t want to play music anymore.\u00a0 He and his wife bought a house in the sticks.\u00a0 He literally has roosters and chickens [laughs].\u00a0 He wanted to write music for soundtracks and stuff like that but I think pretty quickly he was missing performing.\u00a0 We had an original bass player in Duel that was a great guy for when we started out but as things started progressing pretty quickly, we needed somebody with a bit more stage experience and who was a songwriter as well.\u00a0 I called Shawn and I didn’t think he’d be interested in it.\u00a0 I sent him some songs and he listened to one song and called me back and said, “I’m in.\u00a0 Let’s do it.” [laughs]<\/p>\n

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Scorpion Child must have been quite a learning experience.\u00a0 What kind of things will you do differently with Duel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve had our powwows about how much time we’re going to spend on the road.\u00a0 We’re all for doing a couple of long tours a year but we learned a lot from the Scorpion Child experience.\u00a0 A lot of what was driving that band to be on the road so much was the guy managing them at the time.\u00a0 We also saw a lot of the downside to that.\u00a0 We oversaturated markets to where our guarantees and attendance were actually dropping.\u00a0 It seemed like the ideal thing to do would be to do about two tours a year or something.<\/p>\n

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Duel just finished a tour supporting fellow Texans Mothership.\u00a0 How did that go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was only about a dozen shows but it was really cool.\u00a0 We had already gone out to the West Coast once and we did a little Southern touring but that Mothership one kind of just came along.\u00a0 We were a little reluctant to do it with the European tour coming up so soon but we did it and ended up being cool.<\/p>\n

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That little run must’ve made a dent though.\u00a0 I heard a lot of great things about your sets on that run.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh yeah.\u00a0 We really felt like it.\u00a0 We just went back to Mobile and did some Louisiana shows and our crowd went from 20 people on our first tour to playing to three times as many people on the Mothership tour.\u00a0 The merch sales were really good.\u00a0 I mean, we’re picking up and starting from the ground so it’s cool to see it grow so fast.\u00a0 Our label has also been so rad.\u00a0 All the guys in this band have been established and have done collective things.\u00a0 These guys have toured in double decker tour busses and all that but 60 days ago, we were all sleeping together in a tent in a shopping mall parking lot and they’re totally cool.\u00a0 They just wake up in the morning and say, “Yeah!\u00a0 Let’s do it!”\u00a0 [laughs]\u00a0 It’s a good group of dudes.<\/p>\n

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Your label is based overseas.\u00a0 Does this make things hard for you guys business wise?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was real nice to hook up with this label because they helped us get a lot of things done really quickly and are helping us to get to the next point a lot faster.\u00a0 For instance, they book us, provide the backline, the vans, all that.\u00a0 This makes it so that bands can tour and can promote the records that they’re trying to sell.\u00a0 The other thing is that the touring we’ve done over the last four or five months, everything’s been like seven hours a day driving, then you play the show, then you try and find a place to stay.\u00a0 For our European tour, the way it’s been routed, we’re not driving for more than two hours a day [laughs].\u00a0 They provide lodging and food.\u00a0 It makes it much more possible to do it and do more of it.\u00a0 It will feed into what we’re doing here in the states.\u00a0 He has worldwide distribution.\u00a0 Our agreement with him is also like a hand shake.\u00a0 He told us that next year if someone else comes along that seems like a good thing for us, we just shake hands and move on.\u00a0 We’re not trapped into anything.<\/p>\n

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Will you guys be doing another US run?\u00a0 You do realize if you don\u2019t come back to Atlanta I\u2019m going to be super pissed at you dude.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laughs] Oh yeah, we will, dude.\u00a0 We will [laughs].\u00a0 The south has been really good to us.\u00a0 We\u2019ve made a lot of great friends down there.\u00a0 We\u2019ll be back for sure.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

You bet, Don.\u00a0 Thanks so much for your support and we\u2019ll be back down there hopefully this summer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tom, thanks so much for doing this man.\u00a0 This was a lot of fun and I\u2019m glad we finally did it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For more on Duel, check them out at https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/DUELTEXAS<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s time now to interview someone from that little ol\u2019 band outta Texas.\u00a0 No, not ZZ Top.\u00a0 I\u2019m talking about Texas\u2019 very own Duel.\u00a0 Duel is the creative bank for former Scorpion Child guitarist Tom Frank.\u00a0 Along with former Scorpion Child bassist, Shaun Avants, Tom has re-emerged on the scene after a nice little break with a band all his own and I couldn\u2019t be more pumped about this band. Duel recently released their debut album on Heavy Psych Sounds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":15018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[1470,1548,977,1544],"class_list":["post-15798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-duel","tag-heavy-psych-records","tag-scorpion-child","tag-tom-frank"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fractal-Pictures-3.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}